Startup Review

Jumpstart Automotive Case Study: blueprint for a vertical ad network

Jay Parkhill — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 04:35:10 +0000

Jumpstart Automotive Media is a vertical advertising network focused on the automotive market. The company represents automotive web publishers for advertising sales and offers a suite of services for advertisers and publishers around that core business. Vertical advertising networks have received significant attention and investment recently, so Jumpstart’s story is timely. The [...]

StepUp Commerce: subscription model for early market

Jay Parkhill — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 06:55:42 +0000

Many consumer Internet companies leverage the scale of the internet to offer cost savings over local brick-and-mortar businesses. StepUp Commerce instead uses the interactivity of the Internet to help local businesses compete against internet companies and big-box retailers. Likening itself to an internet-era yellow pages, StepUp helps local retail businesses increase visibility and [...]

Wallstrip Case Study: Delivering content where it is consumed

Jay Parkhill — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:48:25 +0000

Why profiled on Startup Review Wallstrip, which produces short online video pieces covering stocks, is a fascinating and unusual business. Born of the blogosphere, founded by a venture capitalist who says he never intended to run it as a long-term business, funded with seed capital and sold less than a year later, the company fairly [...]

Flektor Case Study: Counter to prevailing Web 2.0 wisdom

Nisan Gabbay — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:31:45 +0000

Flektor is a unified suite of tools that enables users to create, manage, and share personal media across a variety of Internet sites. The service can best be compared to Slide and RockYou, but with a more powerful toolset for content creation, like video and photo editing tools. Users create “fleks” - photobooks, [...]

Key success factors for Facebook apps

Nisan Gabbay — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:36:10 +0000

Like everyone else these days, I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and the F8 application platform. I thought I would share some of my research notes here, but this was not meant to be an exhaustive analysis. As of this writing, there were 18 Facebook apps (not developed by Facebook) having 1M or [...]

LoopNet Case Study: Partnerships build data asset

Rob Finn — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 05:32:29 +0000

Why profiled on Startup Review Loopnet is a leading online marketplace for real estate brokers, agents, buyers, and investors to sell and buy property. Founded in 1995, the company IPO’d in 2006 and has grown to feature more than $408 billion in properties for sale and 3.2 billion square feet of space for lease as of [...]

How to work with imperfect timing – an Elance example

Jay Parkhill — Mon, 14 May 2007 04:44:28 +0000

Rare companies like YouTube show what happens when entrepreneurs stumble on the right idea at just the right time, but I suspect that most companies miss the time window slightly and have to adjust. Elance is an interesting study in how to adapt when the market isn’t ready. Elance is an online agency that matches [...]

Reddit Case Study: How personality impacts product success

Nisan Gabbay — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:49:22 +0000

Why profiled on Startup Review Reddit is a social news site that was launched in June 2005. As of April 2007, Reddit is generating ~170,000 unique visitors and 1.9M page views per day. The company was acquired by Conde Nast Publications in October 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Reddit is thus far the [...]

eCrush Case Study: Why timing the M&A market is tricky

Nisan Gabbay — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 01:26:33 +0000

Why profiled on Startup Review The eCrush network is comprised of several major sites (ecrush.com, espinthebottle.com, and highschoolstyleboard.com) that offer flirting, matchmaking, quizzes, romantic content and social networking type features to teenagers (age 13-19). The sites receive over 1 million unique visitors per month, and rank as the 10th largest dating site in the US [...]

YouTube Case Study: Widget marketing comes of age

Deepak Thomas — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 05:29:42 +0000

This week’s case study was co-authored by guest writers Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch. Deepak is an MBA student at the University of Chicago. He previously worked at Oracle for 10 years in engineering and product management roles. He is currently looking for summer internship opportunities at early-stage Venture Capital firms. He may be reached [...]